by Brian Thomas, M.S. *

Planets, including the earth, generate magnetic fields that encompass the space around them. Observations have shown that, like earth’s, the planet Mercury’s magnetic field is rapidly breaking down, and NASA’sMessenger spacecraft confirmed that again earlier this year.

If the planets in the solar system are billions of years old, why do these magnetic fields still exist?

In 1974 and 1975, the Mariner 10 spacecraft measured Mercury’s magnetic field strength with its onboard magnetometer and sent the data to earth. The astronomers analyzing the data at the time found that the average magnetic moment was 4.8 x 1022 gauss cm3, which yields a field strength “about 1% that of the Earth.”1

A decade later, creation physicist D. Russell Humphreys published a magnetic field model based on clues from the Bible. He reasoned that earth and the planets all shared a watery beginning, in accord with Genesis 1 and 2 Peter 3:5.2 He calculated what the magnetic field strength would have been at the creation by using a mass of aligned water molecules equal to the masses of each planet.

Then, he plotted the rate at which the magnetic fields would have diminished over the roughly 6,000 years since. Humphreys wrote, “Electrical resistance in a planet’s core will decrease the electrical current causing the magnetic field, just as friction slows down a flywheel.”3 The resulting model accurately predicted the magnetic field strengths of Uranus and Neptune, as well as the declining strength of Mercury’s field.4

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